


steel maiden

by orphan_account



Series: The Scythian [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker drinking way too much, Booker's bad decisions, F/F, Quynh being creepy af, Revenge, Suicidal thoughts from people who cannot die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26132872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A century of enforced loneliness had been making his brain play tricks on him. The drinking, admittedly, hadn’t helped that. He’d spent more than a few nights lying on his bed, seeing young Sébastien sitting in the corner, repeating the same phrase over and over again, ‘Why do you want me to die?’He had never met Quynh before, but he had seen her in his dreams, screaming and full of rage as she drowned on a never-ending loop.So why would his brain make her appear in his apartment now?-Booker gets an unexpected visitor in Paris.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko
Series: The Scythian [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884241
Comments: 7
Kudos: 91





	steel maiden

Booker stumbled from alleyway to alleyway. The one thing that he had always been grateful for whenever they were in Europe, was the fact that so many streets had remained more or less the same for the past 250 years. He could drink until his vision started to white out at the edges, and he would still be able to find his way home.

He slumped down onto the steps outside his apartment. He had no idea what he was supposed to be doing for the next century. Even before, with Andy and Joe and Nicky, time had stretched out before him, an unimaginably long and unending expanse. But now? He didn’t have anything to fill his time. Nothing. His only hobby so far was seeing how drunk he could get before alcohol poisoning took.

It never really did, now that he thought about it. The odds of someone finding out that he couldn’t die from it always held him back from the edge.

He took another long swig from the bottle before furrowing his brow. His apartment was at the top of the steps, and...he could hear something. Or someone there. Andy had always sent him out first during one of their missions, before Joe and Nicky, because she said that his instincts were sharper. If he was in the middle of a crisis, he would be the first to notice and the first to move.

He stood up, pressing a hand against the wall to try and steady himself. For the first time that night, he was beginning to think that it had been a bad idea to drink so much.

He staggered up the stairs, pressing himself tightly against the wall, hoping that he wouldn’t fall down and break his neck. Though if he did, he’d at least have something that could occupy him for about twenty minutes out of the next one hundred years.

The door was ajar when he reached it, and when he pushed it open, there was Quynh, standing right in front of him.

“Hello Booker.”

He blinked, rubbing his eyes as he slouched against the wall by the door. “You’re not--”

A century of enforced loneliness had been making his brain play tricks on him. The drinking, admittedly, hadn’t helped that. He’d spent more than a few nights lying on his bed, seeing young Sébastien sitting in the corner, repeating the same phrase over and over again, ‘Why do you want me to die?’

He had never met Quynh before, but he had seen her in his dreams, screaming and full of rage as she drowned on a never-ending loop.

  
So why would his brain make her appear in his apartment now? He hadn’t known her, not even briefly like Joe and Nicky had. Her anger and hate had haunted him when he was a young immortal, but he hadn’t dreamed of her in a very long time. When Andy had said that she was dead, it had seemed pretty likely that she was. After all, they hadn’t been able to find her, and they’d all, more or less, stopped dreaming about her too.

“--real?” Quynh tipped her head back and drank the rest of the scotch in her glass. She held the glass up. “See? Gone.”

His eyes widened as he looked at her--really looked. She wasn’t as tall as Andy was, but she held herself with the same amount of deliberate poise. Her eyes, though, her eyes he thought were full of the same rage that he’d seen in his dreams. Rage, uncontrolled anger. And wild. Spending more than four hundred years doing nothing but dying over and over and over again was bound to make someone wild with anger.

“I need...I need to sit down,” he murmured, as he staggered closer to where Quynh was standing, collapsing onto a chair. He couldn’t help but feel that he was in the jaws of a predator standing this close. “Are you alive? How are you alive?”

Quynh glanced down, touching the top of the bottle of scotch as she drew her lips together. “A fisherman and his son found me. They thought that they hooked a huge, heavy fish, but all they did was drag me up from the bottom. I killed both of them when they realized that I was still alive.”

Booker raised an eyebrow and lifted the bottle. “I’ve had this much to drink in the past hour,” he said, pointing to two spaces on the bottle several inches apart. “And I know that you’re bullshitting me.”

She smiled wickedly, showing far too many teeth, before she said, “Does it really matter how I got here, Booker?”

Booker furrowed his brow. “Andy had us all looking for you for decades. We never found you. I would say that it matters a whole lot.”

Quynh considered this for a moment. Or at least, she seemed to. Booker was definitely beginning to regret drinking as much as he had--maybe if he was sober, she would have been easier to read.

Then again, maybe she wouldn’t have been. Maybe who she was before had been left at the bottom of the English Channel.

“Are you happy here, Booker?”

“What kind of question is that?”

Quynh was staring out the window, with the kind of intensity that made Booker think that she was assessing and analyzing their surroundings. “Are you happy being a drunk for the next century?”

“How do you--”

Quynh waved a hand. “I know a lot of things Booker.”

Booker’s temples were throbbing, and he reached up to massage them. “And how is it that you know those things?” It was one thing to be drunk off his ass, but it was another to be drunk off his ass in a converted safe house with a ghost claiming that they knew things. Presumably things about him, and his life.

“What do you want?”

Quynh turned and looked at him, leaning forward to stare in his eyes. When he looked–really looked--he thought that she looked hollow, translucent. A ghost of a woman that had drowned in the English Channel.

“Dying gives you a lot of time to think, Booker,” she mused, fingers curling around one of the empty bottles that had been left on the table. “They thought me and Andy were cursed. But what they didn’t understand was that they were blessed, me and her. Powerful. Death could never find us.”

“It found Lykon,” he said weakly, and Quynh slammed the bottle down on the table.

“I am not Lykon,” she said firmly, lips twisting into a parody of a smile. She tutted to herself. “Like I was saying Booker--death could not find us. And I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I would want if I had the chance to return to the world.”

“What do you want?” he repeated, throat feeling raw all of a sudden. He was beginning to wish that he had been able to drink himself to death, if only to be able to avoid this conversation, avoid Quynh.

Then again, a woman who had spent four hundred years underwater was one that had an infinite amount of patience.

“I want you to help me, Booker,” she said finally. “You’re smart. I need someone like you, who knows about the way the world works now, who can think on their feet. That’s you, isn’t it?”

Booker shook his head. “No, no...I...can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

The last time that he’d tried to help someone he shouldn’t have, his life had become even longer and lonelier than it already was.

“Paying...” Booker murmured, cradling his head in his hands. “I’m paying for what I did.” While Quynh hadn’t asked him anything about Andy, he could feel, deep down in the pit of his stomach, where this could eventually head.

“Booker, do you want to see Sébastien again?” Quynh asked.

His breath caught in his throat. “How do you--”

He could practically see Sébastien before him, his legacy, his entire world, physically older than he would ever be, coughing and sputtering and desperately trying to cling to life as he tried to plead for the secrets to ever-lasting life.

If he knew them, he wouldn’t have survived the battle, now would he?

“--I know a lot of things, that’s just one of them,” Quynh shrugged. “Will you help me then?”

“This isn’t about Andy?” he asked. It wasn’t hard to guess the nature of their relationship. After a few hundred years, Andy had been determined to believe that she’d died, and would become stone-faced when anyone dared to mention her name.

The smile that flitted across Quynh’s features almost looked sad, if it weren’t for the fact that she looked as though she was trying to force the emotion.

“No, Booker, I’m not looking for Andy.”

He nodded grimly. If Quynh wasn’t looking for Andy, then Andy didn’t have to know, did she?

-

That night, Sébastien watched him from the arm chair in the corner of his bedroom. Never getting up, never saying anything. It was enough to make Booker wonder if he was really there.

-

Andy laid out a map on the table. They were crowded together in a small apartment in Khabarovsk--Nile was wrapped in a blanket, confident that she’d never been this cold in her entire life, not even when the polar vortex had blown through Chicago.

She drew large, red x’s through several of the dots on the map. “These are the locations that Copley says have been compromised.”

Nile pursed her lips. There were three lines in total, which wasn’t as bad as she’d assumed the situation was when Andy had called a meeting, but it was still fairly bad, she thought. Fewer places for them to go and not be recognized, and if they really had lived as long as they had told her they had, every single one of those safe houses counted.

“What do you mean compromised?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Andy took a breath. “Destroyed, basically. Security systems throttled. Any secret entrances that they had are not so secret anymore.”

Joe and Nicky exchanged a look between them. Joe said something in rapid Italian (an Italian that Nile was beginning to learn was not the same as the one that came up on the Duolingo app on the phone that Andy had lent her), and Nicky shook his head and said something back.

“What?” Nile prompted.

“He was just saying that...it could be Booker,” Nicky explained.

Nile could feel the tension rise in the room. Andy’s shoulders tightened the same way that they always did when Booker’s name was mentioned. She’d spent a long time wondering if Andy had ever loved him the way that Joe and Nicky loved each other, before she reminded herself that the easy familiarity that they had with each other was the same that she’d had with her brother, back before she’d been deployed.

Back before she’d known that she would outlive him, not just by months or years, but by centuries.

“What interest could Booker have in our safe houses?” Andy asked. Joe and Nicky shared a look before Joe piped up.

“I don’t know Boss, but...I don’t like it,” he murmured.

-

It took Quynh several days to convince him to start hacking into the safe houses’ security systems.

“You told me that you weren’t looking for Andy, what do the safe houses have to do with anything?”

He positively bristled at the thought of putting Andy in danger. He’d already put a bullet in her expecting her to heal when she couldn’t. Not anymore. The last thing that he wanted to do was turn his century of solitude into an eternity of one.

And if he lived to be half as old as Andy did, that would definitely be an eternity.

“I’m not looking for Andy.”

Booker muttered under his breath. He couldn’t trust a ghost to tell the truth, especially not one that spoke Andy’s name with the reverence that he remembered, at one point, being reserved for gods.

But at the very least, hacking into the security systems gave him something else to focus on, a semblance of purpose that he’d lost when he’d been forced into exile.

Well, he thought, calling it being forced was rather more generous to himself than he deserved.

Quynh peered over his shoulder, staring down at the laptop as her lips curved into a smile. “You work fast.”

“Why do you want me to do this?” Booker asked, furrowing his brow. “How did you even know what these systems could do?”

She gave him a disapproving, impatient look. “Well, we need allies, don’t we? Plus, they will want to help us once they see what we’re doing.”

He’d spent most of the past few days going in and out of drink-induced delirium, but he was positive that wouldn’t have made sense if he was sober. But with Quynh dangling the possibility of seeing Sébastien again in front of him, it was hard to stop himself.

And they would be fine minus a few safe houses, wouldn’t they? It wasn’t like he was trying to hand them over to Merrick’s lab a second time. The more he repeated that to himself, the better he felt about the safe houses that he’d shut down.

“Allies for what?”

Quynh gripped his shoulder tightly. “Oh, you will see.”

-

Two more safe houses were compromised by the end of the week, this time--the one in Berlin and one in Szeged. “Metaphorically burned to the ground,” Andy had explained, sounding more tired than angry or frustrated.

“Can Copley find out who’s doing this?”

“Already have him on it,” Andy shrugged. “But whoever’s doing it is good. The whole security system was just...shredded. It’ll take time to get another one up and running, especially without...Booker.”

Nile bit her lip. She felt a knot of confusion and anger rising from the pit of her stomach. Maybe, she wondered if they had accepted him back into the group, understood why he’d done what he’d done, there wouldn’t be someone out there trying to smoke them out.

Andy raised an eyebrow. “You have that look on your face.” She waved at her face. “The one where you’re thinking about how bad something is. It’s like you can’t decide if you want to try and run away or run straight toward it.”

“I was just--” Nile started, before she stopped and drew her lips together. “Sorry, I don’t have room to talk. I didn’t know him like you guys did.”

“If you’re going to tell me that it must be hard, I’m going to punch you,” Andy grunted.

  
A ghost of smile played across Nile’s features. She shrugged. “I don’t know, it must.”

Andy reached over and punched her in the arm, smiling a little more than she had over the past few weeks.

-

That night, Nile dreamed of Paris, empty bottles of Scotch, and Booker, looking worse than he had in Merrick’s lab.

-

“I have names,” Quynh said to him one day, after he had just hacked into another safe house.

“What names?”

“The names of every single one of those people who put me in the water,” she said bitterly. “I never forgot them.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine Quynh dying over and over and over again, remembering nothing but her rage and the names of those who had caused it. In a way, he empathized with it.

“You do know that they’re all dead now, right?” He was confident, at least, that there were no immortal Anglican priests that were running around England.

“Of course,” Quynh said, giving him a toothy smile. “But they’re bad people, Booker. We’re going to find them, and then we’re going to kill them.”

He eyed Quynh warily for a moment as he tapped out a code on his laptop. He pledged to do as much research as he possibly could in order to determine if the people that Quynh was looking for really were bad people.

In the meantime, he had begun to play a game with himself. It wasn’t even really a game, so much as it was him wanting to figure out the truth about her and why she’d ended up in his apartment.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “How long have you been out of the water, Quynh?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Three days.”

-

A few hours later, Booker asked again.

“Two weeks,” Quynh said.

Every time he asked her a personal question, the answers shifted like they’d been made of sand.

-

“I’m telling you, she’s in Paris. With Booker,” Nile said over dinner that evening. They’d been in Russia far longer than they’d meant to, because safe houses kept disappearing off the map. How Khabarovsk hadn’t been hit yet was anyone’s guess.

Andy was seated at the head of the table, flipping her knife between her fingers. “We’re not going to Paris because you keep having nightmares.”

“They’re not...” Nile took a deep breath. “They’re not nightmares. They’re real. I know they’re real.”

Andy caught her knife and stabbed it into the table. “They’re nightmares. They don’t mean anything.”

“Boss,” Joe said gently. “Do you think that it might be possible that...the powers have changed?”

“No,” Andy said sharply, shaking her head. “They haven’t changed. They don’t change. They’ve been the same for thousands of years.”

Nile bit her lip. “You’ve seen them change.” Quynh’s memory of Lykon bleeding to death on a grassy hill was burned into her mind.

Andy’s expression turned sour. “I’m done with this conversation.”

Nicky watched as Andy retreated to her room in the apartment. “It’s too painful for her, you should give her time.”

Nile let out a shaky breath. “I don’t think we have that much time to figure this out.” With safe houses disappearing off the map so quickly, they were going to need to figure out what was happening sooner, rather than later, she thought.

-

Half the time that Quynh stalked around the apartment, Booker felt like he was close to crawling out of his skin. Being confident that she wasn’t an alcohol-induced hallucination was one thing, but having a ghost as a roommate was something else entirely.

She settled into the chair opposite him, a spot that Sébastien had sometimes taken up when he was too drunk to get all the way to the bedroom. “You’re afraid of me, Booker.”

Booker shook his head. “No, I’m not afraid of you.”

Quynh smiled. Booker couldn’t tell if she knew that he was lying or not. “Good.”

-

The first name that Quynh had him find was Annabelle Brightmore, a British ex-pat that was teaching English in Moscow. “How can you be sure this is the person you’re looking for?” he’d asked as the image of a young woman with bright red hair appeared on the screen.

He’d been combing government databases (he really didn’t think that Quynh appreciated just how hard some of her requests were), ancestry archives, and a winding labyrinth of historical record. None of it seemed like it could add up to saying that Annabelle Brightmore was descended from same man that had dragged Quynh into the iron maiden.

She put a hand on his shoulder, as she stared ahead at the image. Booker wasn’t certain if her icy grip was from his imagination or not.

“I know, Booker.”

His protests died in his throat, and an odd feeling, a disquieting one, washed over him. This was one of the few things that Quynh had said that he knew, without a doubt, was true.

-

The following morning, Quynh confessed that she saw Andy in a dream. Booker had barely been able to process how normal this confession was. “She’s in Russia too, so that’s where we’re going to go.”

Booker was loath to give up the apartment, even if it didn’t feel like home, even if the apartment seemed, on some occasions, to terrify him.

“Okay, that’s where we’re going to go,” he agreed.

A knot settled in his stomach. He had a bad feeling about this.


End file.
